Usually a hologram is produced by means of an interference experiment. Here, however, we let a computer- guided plotter draw the hologram. The plot, which has to be minified and recorded on film, contains no grey, only binary transmittance values. Our binary holograms yield reconstructed images of a quality equal to that of images obtained from usual holograms of comparable dimensions. When a Fourier hologram is inserted into the Fraunhofer plane of a coherent image forming system, it acts as a special type of a spatial filter, a so-called optical matched filter. Our binary matched filter is suitable for optical character recognition, the same as the usual optical matched filter introduced by Vander Lugt.

Holograms synthesized by computer are used for constructing optical wavefronts from numerically specified objects. Elimination of the need for a physical object has made new applications possible, for example, three-dimensional computer output displays, synthetic prototypes for interferometric testing, and filters for various optical data processing operations. Our computer holograms differ from a normal hologram in that the transmittance is binary, yet they are able to construct general wavefronts and imagesefficiently and haveseveral practicaladvantages over holograms witha continuousrange of transmittance. Recentimprovements that simplify the production of binary holograms and improve their performance are described and experimental work showing reconstruction of two-and three-dimensional images is presented.

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